BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: TRAVEL #2

Paul Gauguin. Landscape in Brittany. Los Angeles County Museum.
**

travel (v.)
late 14c., "to journey," from travailen (1300) "to make a journey," originally "to toil, labor" (see travail). The semantic development may have been via the notion of "go on a difficult journey," but it also may reflect the difficulty of any journey in the Middle Ages. Replaced Old English faran. Related: Traveled; traveling. Traveled (adj.) "having made journeys, experienced in travel" is from early 15c. Traveling salesman is attested from 1885.

Etymological Dictionary On Line
**

RICHARD GID POWERS VISITS PARIS

 “I’m in Paris now  which is a GREAT place for not seeing UFOs. Or if they do see UFOs and say they do, they talk funny here so I can’t understand what they’re saying, if they say they see them or they don’t see ‘em, all sounds the same to me. "

from his Chosie Humor Post for October 7, 2023

**

SOWETO, SOUTH AFRICA

“Soweto was designed to be bombed –that’s how forward-thinking the architects of apartheid were. The township was a city unto itself, with a population of nearly one million. There were only two roads in and out. That was so the military could lock us in, quell any rebellion. And if the monkeys ever went crazy and tried to break out of their cage, the air force could fly over and bomb the shit out of everyone. Growing up, I never knew that my grandmother lived in the center of a bull’s eye.”

Trevor Noah. Born a Crime (
**

EVERY SAILOR NEEDS A FRIEND

“Somewhere in the Southern ocean, as the immortal Captain Joshua Slocum recounted in his journal Around the World in the Sloop Spray, he was touched to discover that his loneliness was ephemeral. An intrepid spider in the cabin was spinning sidewise while he spun forward, and the knowledge of their companionship inspirited him for the rigors that lay ahead.”

S.J. Perelman. “ Looking For Pussy” in Eastward Ha!
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977)

**
an excerpt from "The Accidental Hotel," about The Atlanta Hotel, a budget hotel in Bangkok by Donald A. Ranard

"It was the kind of place travelers were always looking for, a combination restaurant, café, and bistro, where you could get a good, inexpensive meal, linger for hours over coffee, or while away a hot afternoon over beer. It was a natural gathering place, and what was best about the restaurant was what was best about the hotel: the mix of people. In an age of niche marketing, The Atlanta was an anomaly,; it cut across the usual segregating categories of age, class, and lifestyle. There were has-been hippies and would be hipsters, clean-cut college students and backpacking grandmothers, budget-minded families and middle-aged men on a Bangkok debauch, German scholars of Thai Buddhism, Swedish relief workers on R&R from Cambodia, blue-collar Brits, freelance writers, one or two indigents, and on the sidelines, quietly studying the show, a contingent of local day trippers that included, every Sunday at noon, a small group of That Baptists from a neighborhood church."

From:
Donald A Ranard
The Accidental Hotel
The Best Travel Writing 2005

**

WOBURN, MASSACHUSETTS

“I had come from Woburn, Massachusetts, a fine 
New England town noted for its rambunctious biker
gangs, its indicted and convicted mayors and the 
worse toxic-waste dumping grounds in the United 
States. But it’s also an old colonial city with 
a bronze minuteman on the town green guarding 
the white-shingled Methodist church and a great 
ivy-covered library with a statue of Count Rumford 
on its front lawn.”

Eric Bogosian. Drinking in America (New York:
Vintage Books, 1987)
**
FOR THE FANS OF THE LEGEND & LORE 
OF KING ARTHUR

“ A cold, wind driven rain soaks through my parka as I
walk across a narrow foot-bridge that links the Cornwall mainland in southwest England to a rocky promontory
overlooking the Bristol Channel. Far below this cantilevered span, waves crash against the cliffs and swirl
inside a grotto known as Merlin’s Cave.”

Joshua Hammer. “The Forever Legend” in Smithsonian
Magazine (September 2022)
**
People also ask about the fictional cave of Merlin

“What is inside Merlin's cave?"
Inside Merlin's Cave contains Numerous poems, commentaries, prophecies and plays, including the full text of Thomas Hardy's Queen of Cornwall, that establish Cornwall not just as the birthplace of King Arthur but as a source of all Arthurian themes.”

Internet: Merlin's Cave
**

LOVE, WHEN YOU GO

It is not as if
I weigh so much,
Though I am not air,
But when you go,
Say you left behind
An unmade bed,
Shirts upon a chair;
Be of such a mind
That the way back
Is clear & well-defined.

It is not as if
I were necessary baggage
With handles to grasp,
But when you go,
Say you left such
& such behind.
Think as you gauge
Your steps, my hand
In your hand,
My steps with your steps,
& when you stop
To rest, know
Wind's touch & my touch.
Love, when you go ,
Take me with you,
It is not as if
I weigh so very very much...

Louis Phillips